Burden, access and disparities in kidney disease: chronic kidney disease hotspots and progress one step at a time

The 2019 International Society of Nephrology World Kidney Day theme is Kidney Health for Everyone Everywhere. It focuses on the uneven burden of acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease (CKD) in different communities, identifies disparities and challenges in access to care and calls for universal health coverage for prevention and early treatment of kidney disease. This topic is fully in line with the Clinical Kidney Journal (ckj) editorial strategy for improving worldwide kidney care without leaving any community behind. Indeed, the first PubMed-recorded use of the term CKD hotspot was in ckj, where it was defined as ‘countries, region[s], communities or ethnicities with higher than average incidence of CKD’. This issue of ckj contains the World Kidney Day editorial as well as contributions that illustrate two concepts: the need to validate biochemical thresholds generated in developed countries in other populations, as exemplified by Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes CKD–mineral and bone disorder parameters in an African population, and the fact that some disease associations characteristic of developing countries may be described initially in developed countries, as exemplified by the association of APOL1 variants with CKD or by minimal change disease secondary to malaria, but have to be validated locally.